The Royal Society’s Copley Medal has been awarded since 1737. This is the once awarded to Dmitri Mendeleev in 1905.
Photograph: Wikipedia

The idea of a prize medal for outstanding scientific work is so ubiquitous that we rarely stop to think about it. Yet it has not always been the obvious way to reward competitive achievement. It was once an innovation, and is one that tells us as much about the enthusiasms of a particular group of 18th-century gentleman as about the new world of experimental science that they sought to celebrate.

While I am always wary of claims to something being “the first” (other examples and precedents can nearly always be found, or prove more significant), there is a good claim for the Royal Society’s Copley Medal as the first prize medal. Since 1737 it has been offered for whatever scientific work was considered worth rewarding. That, of course, has changed considerably over time, but it was always presented as an honorary, annual reward for scientific merit.

While there had previously been monetary rewards and prizes for scientific work –for example under the 1714 Longitude Act or by the French Academy of Sciences – there was no obvious and immediate precedent for a competition that was open to any field, or for a medal. In Britain it was only relatively recently that medals had been offered to reward specific naval services, commemorate events or the famous. So what led to the Royal Society commissioning a medal in the 1730s?

The answer is two-fold. Firstly, the Society’s Council members found themselves with an awkward pot of money. This was a bequest made in the will of a Fellow of the Society, Godfrey Copley, who died in 1709. This left “the sum of one hundred pounds upon trust for the Royal Society of London for improving natural knowledge to be laid out in experiments or otherwise for the benefit thereof”. Copley’s idea was that this money would help pay for the experimental demonstrations often carried out during meetings. There was no mention of medals or competitions.

The Society only received the £100 in 1717 but at this point it was decided that they should spend only the annual interest, so that they might “for ever” pay for an experiment to be performed annually at a special event. Over the next few years this money, which turned out to be £5, was usually paid to John Theophilus Desaguliers, who already regularly performed experiments for the Society at an annual cost of considerably over £5.

In the 1720s it was suggested that this money might be used to create a “publick Invitation and Encouragement” if it were advertised more generally and asked for proposals for new experiments. It seems, though, that while £5 would buy a lot for most people in the 1720s, it didn’t go all that far as an incentive for either the kind of gentlemen who were Fellows of the Royal Society, or to make up for earnings lost by working men while they turned their attention to experimental philosophy.

Thinking, presumably, of the former group, in 1736 it was suggested that the £5 interest on Copley’s legacy might be rendered “more beneficial than it is at present” if they should “convert the value of it into a Medal or other honorary Prize”. It was hoped that “a laudable Emulation might be excited among Men of Genius to try their Invention, who in all probability may never be moved for the sake of Lucre.”

Thus, striking a medal was seen as a way to render £5-worth of gold more meaningful than its mere monetary value. By creating medals bearing the Society’s coat of arms and Athena offering laurels, striking them at the Royal Mint, annually declaring a winner, and, over time, building up a list of honoured recipients, they ultimately succeeded in doing this.

The second part of the answer to “why a medal?” is that the Royal Society’s Council included a group with a fascination for numismatics. They were scholars and collectors of historic and modern coins and medals, a topic then often discussed at meetings of the Society

This group included Martin Folkes, who was the one who made the 1736 suggestion of a medal. Although probably not well known today, Folkes is most likely to be celebrated within the context of the Royal Society as its President and as an astronomer and protégé of Isaac Newton. But he was also a numismatist, who published on the weights and values of English coins, and a President of the Society of Antiquaries.

Another significant early Fellow of the Royal Society who published on coins and medals was John Evelyn. In his book Numismata (1697) he lauded these historic metal artefacts as “the most lasting and ... Vocal Monuments of Antiquity”. He suggested that his contemporaries might inform future historians by striking new medals to the honoured and famous, noting that those known for “experimental learning” were as “fit to have been stamp’d and worn in Medals of Gold” as any Greek or Roman hero.

Medal-making as an art developed quickly in Britain in the later 18th century, with high quality medals being commercially produced for the first time. The idea of the prize medal took off in the wake of the Copley Medal. An exhibition now on at the Ashmolean is dedicated to the phenomenon – awarded by societies, schools, universities, agricultural shows and more – in its 1750 to 1850 heyday.

Suddenly prize medals were everywhere. And with the Rumford, Royal and a host of other medals at the Royal Society following in the next 150 years, they became ubiquitous as rewards for scientific work. The Nobel Prize medals cemented the concept, particularly for science, as Olympic medals do for sport. Yet without the broad scholarly interests of the 18th-century fellows of the Royal Society, and the awkward bit of money they found themselves with, might it have been a different story?